Blair Witch Project, Afghanistan, and Irrational Exuberance

[Note: I started this yesterday and should have posted it with the movies/war post--would have better explained my meaning.]

What the discussion over the Downing Street Memos lacks (see Crooked Timber, Dan Drezner, Kevin Drum) is the climate of opinion in summer 2002. This is how I remember it, without doing any research in old papers.

Remember that the history of Afghanistan was up and down, just enough to be suspenseful. Bush gave the Taliban a time limit to get rid of bin Laden, it expired, we saw some military moves, there was some speculation on the left and in the media about how the Northern Alliance and we were bogged down, then all of a sudden the air campaign took effect, the Taliban collapsed and everything seemed rosy. Speaking for myself, I exhaled a big sigh of relief. I don't remember significant opposition to the war, there were just enough problems for us all to feel relieved and joyous when Kabul fell.

What lessons did we draw from Afghanistan? Perhaps the same sort of lessons we learned when Netscape had its IPO--irrational exuberance. Particularly in the Pentagon--we had a new way of war, precision munitions, low casualties, and devastating effectiveness. So Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld justifiably felt their judgment was vindicated, their arms powerful. Liberals like me, who had been ready to leap on Bush for miring us in another Vietnam in Afghanistan, lost confidence. There was a new conventional wisdom abroad.

In sum, the Afghanistan war was an exception to Harshaw's Rule no. 1, you always fail the first time. But maybe I can get a reprieve for my rule, by adding a corollary: "but if you do succeed the first time, you'll get a big head." Witness the Blair Witch Project. Perfectly amazing success. But what was the name of the sequel? Very often in the history of movies the sequel is much inferior to the initial success (the Bridget Jones and Ocean's 11 sequels are examples).

Anyhow, in this theory Bush and Rumsfeld, enthused by their Afghanistan hit (pun intended), decided for a sequel in Iraq. I think it's true, as most of the bloggers on the Downing Street papers say, that they believed that Iraq had some WMD and wanted WMD and was bad and should be taken down. I also think they screwed the planning because of the euphoria from Afghanistan. They thought it'd be easy because Afghanistan had been easy. I'd also blame us liberals--I don't remember any vigorous opposition. There was a sneaking suspicion that Bush might be right, at the very least the country mostly was behind him. The most Congressional Democrats could do was to push for going to the UN. But that was just a slower road to the same destination. (No one ever came up with an alternative to war that seemed reasonable--doing nothing rarely seems reasonable.)

As E.J. Dionne said in yesterday's Post the administration fooled themselves. (Just as the producers of the Blair Witch sequel fooled themselves.)

Kingpin (Kingbolt) or Mascot

The Washington Post notes a birthday party for a 40-year Justice Department bureaucrat:

"Few occasions would seem likely to bring together Alberto R. Gonzales, the Republican attorney general, and one of his Democratic predecessors, Janet Reno. But the party yesterday in the Justice Department's soaring Great Hall was no ordinary event.

Several hundred people from both sides of the aisle gathered to honor and poke fun at David Margolis, the associate deputy attorney general who -- as of yesterday -- has worked at the Justice Department for 40 years under 16 attorneys general."

I suspect most established bureaucracies have an old-timer around. In my days at Agriculture they often fell into two categories: mascots and kingbolts. Another name for a mascot was "a character", as in "that's so-and-so for you". Mascots often earned their keep as ornaments, rather than workers. They added flavor to the workplace and the office would have been diminished without their presence, but they weren't vital cogs.

Kingbolt is a term I got when I looked up "kingpin" at http://www.m-w.com--it offers a secondary definition as the pin in a knuckle joint, as in a car transmission, while "kingbolt" is the pin that couples two rail cars together. Going back to my "clutches and shear pins" post, I can't resist the metaphor. A kingbolt is a career bureaucrat who has both the knowledge and personality to act as an interpreter between the political appointees and the bureaucracy. It's a two way deal: helping politicians to sort out alternative ways of achieving their objectives, heading off impractical ideas while ensuring the concerns of the bureaucracy get heard. (Bureaucrats are often like the Victorians, do anything you want as long as you don't frighten the horses.) Of course, sometimes they're the way the bureaucracy co-opts the policy maker but sometimes they're the way the policy maker alters history.

Why Movies and Wars Are Similar

Slate has an interesting article mining a scholarly "metapaper": The Moviegoer - What social scientists and economists can tell us about our cinematic preferences. By Michael Agger.

"Here's how the authors summarize the process by which expensive bombs like The Adventures of Pluto Nash come into the world: '[W]hen costs are sunk progressively and information on a project's quality is revealed gradually, rational decision makers can carry projects to completion that realize enormous ex post losses.' Rational decision-making led to a $100 million film with Eddie Murphy running a nightclub on the moon in the year 2087. That's funny."

I assume that the same logic applies whenever a small group of decisionmakers get together and decide to do a project. Like, for example, the Iraq war.

USDA Does PrePackaged News

USDA has been criticized for its practice of doing, or contracting for, reports on its activities that only at the end say they've been done by USDA. TV stations then snip the end and pass it off as their product. I've previously posted that I think the stations are wrong, not USDA, but this rider in the Ag. Appropriations bill would stop the practice:

"SEC. 765. Unless otherwise authorized by existing law, none of the funds provided in this Act, may be used by an executive branch agency to produce any prepackaged news story intended for broadcast or distribution in the United States unless the story includes a clear notification within the text or audio of the prepackaged news story that the prepackaged news story was prepared or funded by that executive branch agency."

You Can't Keep a Good Legend Down

Toni Bentley reviewed a new biography of Mary Wollstonecraft in the NY Times Book World on May 29. In discussing women's status at that time, she threw in a parenthetical statement that is false.

"(In all fairness, a new law in 1782 stated that a husband should not beat his wife with a stick wider than his thumb.)"

One thing we can say for sure is that there was no "new law" in England that said such a thing.
http://tafkac.org/language/etymology/rule_of_thumb.html

http://research.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/ruleofthumb.html

http://www.europrofem.org/02.info/22contri/2.04.en/4en.viol/28en_vio.htm

Credit to the Bookworld, yesterday they published a long letter that included a rebuttal of this legend.

A Conservative, as Defined by a Liberal

A conservative is a person who believes that federal support of a family on welfare should be time limited, but there should be no time limit for our troops in Iraq.

Taxpayer Bill of Rights

The Wall Street Journal editorializes and blogs come alive: Professor Bainbridge and Greg Anrig at TPM Cafe both have takes on TABOR. It's an interesting approach to spin. "Rights" are always good. Most people are taxpayers (though the bill of rights tends to favor those who pay taxes on property or income, as opposed to sales tax and FICA?)

Bainbridge says: ?"A federal TABOR doesn't seem like such a bad idea either." Unfortunately, if you Google on Taxpayer Bill Rights you find this reference: "Almost 20 years in the making, the Taxpayer Bill of Rights is now codified into the Internal Revenue Code." I suspect we're talking different things--the federal TABOR was based on the idea IRS agents abused their power. The WSJ (I don't subscribe) is probably talking a Howard Jarvis type limitation on taxes.

More to come.

Reinventing the Wheel--A Defense

I often find myself ambivalent (reminds me of the Truman joke about wanting a one-armed economist--the economists he had always said: "on the one hand..., on the other hand...).

Having attacked the "creation fallacy" yesterday, today I should defend the idea of reinventing the wheel. The defense is simple: people learn by doing, often better than by any other way. Every baby born has to reinvent the way to walk. So too there are times when it's better to reinvent the wheel just to educate the policy makers. I'm using "educate" here both in the sense of learning facts but also investing or committing to the venture.

Having put this market out, I'll try to keep alert for situations in which people are accused of reinventing the wheel to see if the above is correct.

The Creation Fallacy

No, I'm not talking creationism, but a fallacy that's related to NIH--"not invented here". The fallacy clouds the minds of politicians new to office, though like many fallacies there's some truth in it.

The fallacy takes the form of:

• politicians have objective X. They may legislate a program to achieve X, or they may just want the executive branch to achieve X.
  
• there is a bureaucracy that has existed for a while. It has staff, budgeting and accounting procedures, offices, computers, photocopiers, an organization and a culture.
• the politicians look at the bureaucracy and say (to themselves): "No, we can't entrust our baby, our precious, to this existing bureaucracy. They wouldn't understand it, they don't share our view of its importance, they won't work hard to achieve the objective. What we really need is a new organization. We can pick the people who run it, getting those who believe in the objective, we can dispense with the old bureaucratic rules, we can get something done.
• and they do so, except the new organization has no cohesion, no procedures, no memory. Everything, and I mean everything, is new to it. What does any organization do when it faces something new--it has a meeting, to elicit ideas, to get everyone on board, to see if anyone has an answer to the question of how to turn on the lights. Net result--the new organization staggers along.
  

This post is prompted by the resignation of the head of the Millenium Challenge Corporation. It was proposed by Bush in March 2002. Three years and 2 months later it's just starting to make grants. I don't know when the actual money will hit the ground in the receiving countries. (See this pdf review.Also see the Corporations home page for a more optimistic view.)

The post is also based on my experience at USDA, where we spent years and millions trying to integrate operations of the agencies that service farmers. And when we get the books on the post-war Iraq, I suspect we'll find the creation fallacy operating both at DOD and State.

Bureaucratic Blinkers and Learning

A letter to the editor in today's Washington Post notes that it's been a year since the World War II memorial was opened on the Mall, but Metro's signage has not been updated. From the comfort of my chair, without researching, it shows the problem with bureaucracy. Presumably either the Metro person responsible for signs and maps in the subway or a PR type in the Parks Service might have acted. But each person each day likely focused on immediate concerns within their sphere of responsibility, not on a broader focus. (Popular office sign: It's hard to remember your goal was to drain the swamp when you're up to your ass in alligators.)

It's like commuting--you drive a route a hundred times and you put on blinkers and turn off your mind. You take the route for granted, it fades to be part of the environment you ignore. For the Metro person, even in DC new tourist attractions don't open that often, it's not like you go into the office each day and ask what's new. Similarly for the National Parks PR person--she/he would seldom have occasion to ask Metro to update its maps.

Bureaucrats are capable of learning. Consider the heads of NASA. Daniel Goldin (1992-2001) learned that his motto (something like: "better, faster, cheaper") had problems, notably when NASA lost a couple Mars missions, one when the unit of measure of botched between a European contractor and the US one (another instance of environments taken for granted) Sean O'Keefe (2001-5) learned from Challenger. In both cases I'd expect the learning to be bone deep--you don't fail so drastically and publically without it sinking deep. Now we have a new administrator of NASA, Michael Griffin, with new plans, firing O'Keefe's people and putting in his own. One thing we can be sure of, Griffin surely knows of Goldin and O'Keefe's mistakes, but it's book knowledge, not bone deep. Griffin will try to avoid his predecessor's mistakes, but will make his own. I hope they won't be traumatic.

The problem with Metro signage, though, is the relative rarity of the opening of a new tourist site. Bureaucrats change position and don't learn from rare untraumatic events. (Of course, I could be wrong. It could be that Metro delayed changing its signs because of the expense. When Congress changed the name of National Airport, a particularly vociferous Representative forced Metro to spend a few hundred thousand dollars to update its signs with the new name. What Metro hasn't learned is to replace its signs with LCD screens.)